Praise for Accelerate

“This is the kind of foresight that CEOs, CFOs, and CIOs desperately need if their company is going to survive in this new software-centric world.

Anyone that doesn’t read this book will be replaced by someone who has.”

— Thomas A. Limoncelli, coauthor of
The Practice of Cloud System Administration

“‘Here, do this!’ The evidence presented in Accelerate is a triumph of research, tenacity, and insight, proving not just correlation but a causal link between good technical and management behaviors and business performance. It also exposes the myth of ‘maturity models’ and offers a realistic, actionable alternative. As an independent consultant working at the intersection of people, technology, process, and organization design this is manna from heaven!

As chapter 3 concludes: ‘You can act your way to a better culture by implementing these practices in technology organizations’ [emphasis mine]. There is no mystical culture magic, just 24 concrete, specific capabilities that will lead not only to better business results, but more importantly to happier, healthier, more motivated people and an organization people want to work at. I will be giving copies of this book to all my clients.”

— Dan North, independent technology and organization consultant

“Whether they recognize it or not, most organizations today are in the business of software development in one way, shape, or form. And most are being dragged down by slow lead times, buggy output, and complicated features that add expense and frustrate users. It doesn’t need to be this way. Forsgren, Humble, and Kim shine a compelling light on the what, why, and how of DevOps so you, too, can experience what outstanding looks and feels like.”

— Karen Martin, author of
Clarity First and The Outstanding Organization

“Accelerate does a fantastic job of explaining not only what changes organizations should make to improve their software delivery performance, but also the why, enabling people at all levels to truly understand how to level up their organizations.”

—Ryn Daniels, Infrastructure Operations Engineer at Travis CI
and author of Effective DevOps

“The ‘art’ of constructing a building is a well-understood engineering practice nowadays. However, in the software world, we have been looking for patterns and practices that can deliver the same predictable and reliable results whilst minimising waste and producing the increasingly high performance our businesses demand.

Accelerate provides research-backed, quantifiable, and real-world principles to create world-class, high-performing IT teams enabling amazing business outcomes.

Backed by the two leading thought leaders (Kim and Humble) in the DevOps community and world-class research from PhD Forsgren, this book is a highly recommended asset!”

—Jonathan Fletcher, Group CTO, Hiscox

“In their book Accelerate, Nicole Forsgren, Jez Humble, and Gene Kim don’t break any new conceptual ground regarding Agile, Lean, and DevOps. Instead, they provide something that might be even more valuable, which is a look inside the methodological rigor of their data collection and analysis approach which led them to their earlier conclusions on the key capabilities that make IT organizations better contributors to the business. This is a book that I will gladly be placing on my bookshelf next to the other great works by the authors.”

—Cameron Haight, VP and CTO, Americas, VMware

“The organizations that thrive in the future will be those that leverage digital technologies to improve their offerings and operations. Accelerate summarizes the best metrics, practices, and principles to use for improving software delivery and digital product performance, based on years of well-documented research. We strongly recommend this book to anyone involved in a digital transformation for solid guidance about what works, what doesn’t work, and what doesn’t matter.”

—Tom Poppendieck and Mary Poppendieck, authors of
the Lean Software Development series of books

“With this work, the authors have made a significant contribution to the understanding and application of DevOps. They show that when properly understood, DevOps is more than just a fad or a new name for an old concept. Their work illustrates how DevOps can improve the state of the art in organizational design, software development culture, and systems architecture. And beyond merely showing, they advance the DevOps community’s qualitative findings with research-based insights that I have heard from no other source.”

—Baron Schwartz, Founder and CEO of VividCortex
and coauthor of High Performance MySQL